This present invention concerns the technical area of the high-speed transmission of acquisition data over an Ethernet network.
More precisely, the subject of the invention concerns one and preferably several sensors of the intelligent type, each incorporated into the Ethernet network as a single node.
In many applications, the need arises to remotely transmit measurement data acquired by one or more sensors located at distant sites. Thus, we are familiar, for example, from document US2003-0036875, with a computer network for communication between several computers. At least one of the computers, known as the master, is connected by a bus to a series of sensors for the measurement of diverse physical magnitudes. Such an architecture is used to remotely transmit configuration data from the measurement sensors, via a special communication bus, between the computer and the measurement sensors. This document does not describe a technique for acquisition of the high-speed data, which generally involves a high implementation cost, a relatively fixed measurement architecture that is difficult to develop, and a slowness in the transmission of the acquired data.
From the publication entitled: POTTER D ED, PIURI V ET AL, INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS: “USING ETHERNET FOR INDUSTRIAL I/O AND DATA ACQUISITION”, IMTC/99 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH IEEE INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE, VENICE, IT, MAY 24-26, 1999, IEEE INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE (IMTC), NEW YORK, N.Y.: IEEE, US, VOL. 3, 24 MAY 1999 (1999-05-24), PAGES 1492-1496, XP000871813,
We are also familiar with the use of the Ethernet network for the acquisition of data, such as measurement data coming from sensors. However, the Ethernet network does not allow the operation of the different sensors to be correlated.